Within the administrative frame, these anomalies are always adversaries - crises in legibility, a threat to the capacity to manage, process, and control. If the old institutional regimes are in general crisis, its because the occasional onstaging of anomalous agencies has been accelerated by technology and globalization to a perpetual arrival, a type of singularity anticipated by Terence McKenna as he announced, quoting Finnegans Wake, "Here comes everybody."

What becomes clear from the investigation into the underground, the realm of open protocols, is that it is the very process of relating to the virtual that makes the open protocol thesis work. Recall the definition: open protocols are “social and technical protocols woven together into a compound cultural protocol of improvisational, empirical imagination...

Here at the Open Protocol Research Group, we are most interested in how these zones of defiance, these undergrounds, have emergently protocolized, both as a response to legal or extreme cultural prohibition and as a strategy of avoiding institutionalization, with its tendency to dampen or outright restrict the aesthetic autonomy of its participants...